The present invention relates generally to the control of production facilities, and more particularly to a system used to facilitate optimizing the output of a system of production facilities.
At least some known power generating plants combine at least some of their systems with at least one process plants, such as, but, not limited to a chemical plant, a district heating facility, and/or a paper mill. Combining the power generation plant and the process plant may facilitate increasing the efficiency of one of, or both of, the power generation process and the process plant, by utilizing energy that would otherwise be rejected to the atmosphere or to a heat sink in either the power generating process or the process plant. Known combined power and process plants may include various combinations of gas turbines, fired and non-fired heat recovery boilers, steam turbines, fossil fuel fired boilers, solar boilers, cooling towers, condensers, and/or feed water heaters.
In operation, combined power and process plant demands may vary based on customer demand levels, and on other unpredictable events, such as, but, not limited to, weather conditions. Additionally a ratio between power demand and process production may vary based on seasonal operations. Accordingly, known combination plants may be designed for use with a wide range of operating states to meet the required dispatch of power and process outputs.
However, designing combination plants may be difficult, as each plant may have operating characteristics that are different than every other plant in the combined cycle/combined process plant system, such that an operating efficiency of each plant, defined in terms of the utilization of resources per unit of output, may be different than the operating efficiency of every other plant. For example, within a combined electric generating plant and water desalination process plant, although several resources may be used to generate electricity and/or to desalinate water, improving the efficiency of each plant's use of resources may not necessarily cause the largest impact to the economical generation of electricity and production of water. More specifically, each plant in the combined facility may be operated individually to facilitate maximizing the plant efficiency, or to generate the production output using the least amount of resources. However, maximizing the efficiency of each individual plant may not facilitate maximizing the efficiency of the combined system.
Accordingly, to facilitate maximizing the efficiency of the production system, at least some known power production systems attempt to choose plant settings, such as, but, not limited to, a number of gas turbines in operation, a load level of gas and steam turbines, a duct firing, a number of desalination plants in operation, a top brine temperature, a re-circulation ratio, and a frequency and duration of blow downs to facilitate attaining the highest production system efficiency possible. However, because the conditions that influence each plant's efficiency and the efficiency of the combined production facility constantly change, it may be difficult to monitor and properly adjust plant parameters to achieve an optimum efficiency for the combined production facility.